WASHINGTON (AP) — Employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have entered the U.S. Institute of Peace despite protests from the nonprofit that it is not part of the executive branch and is instead an independent agency.
The organization's CEO, George Moose, said, “DOGE has broken into our building.” Police cars were outside the Washington building Monday evening.
The DOGE workers gained access to the building after several unsuccessful attempts Monday and after having been turned away on Friday, a senior U.S. Institute of Peace official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
It was not immediately clear what the DOGE staffers were doing or looking for in the nonprofit's building, which is across the street from the State Department in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.
President Donald Trump targeted the organization and a few others in a Feb. 19 executive order that aims to shrink the size of the federal government. The administration has since moved to fire and cancel programs at some of those organizations.
DOGE has expressed interest in the U.S. Institute of Peace for weeks but has been rebuffed by lawyers who argued that the institute’s status protected it from the kind of reorganization that is occurring in other federal agencies.
On Friday, DOGE members arrived with two FBI agents, who left after the institute's lawyer told them of USIP’s “private and independent status,” the organization said in a statement.
The U.S. Institute of Peace says on its website that it's a nonpartisan, independent organization “dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad.”
The nonprofit says it was created by Congress in 1984 as an “independent nonprofit corporation,“ and it does not meet U.S. Code definitions of “government corporation,” “government-controlled corporation” or “independent establishment."
Also named in Trump's executive order were the U.S. African Development Foundation, a federal agency that invests in African small businesses; the Inter-American Foundation, a federal agency that invests in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the Presidio Trust, which oversees a national park site next to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
The African Development Foundation, which also unsuccessfully tried to keep DOGE staff from entering its offices in Washington, went to court, but a federal judge ruled last week that removing most grants and most staff would be legal. The president of the Inter-American Foundation sued Monday to block her firing in February by the Trump administration.
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AP reporter Thalia Beaty in New York contributed to this report.
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